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The Deliberate Agrarian: StrawberriesOf The Largest & Finest Quality(the E.P. Roe Way) Paradise Lot | Two plant geeks, one-tenth of an acre and the making of an edible garden oasis in the city. VEG Design Solutions - Part Two - Very Edible Gardens. VEG Design Solutions - Part Two Details Created on Monday, 16 July 2012 08:28 When designing edible gardens, a site-specific problem will often crop up. One of the most enjoyable aspects of permaculture design for us is devising site-specific solutions to those problems. In this series we give some examples from our experiences in Melbourne, with a new one each month for the next few months (you can check out Part One here). Part Two – The Magical Chicken Tunnel Introduction In late 2009 we were engaged to complete a design for a ¼ acre block in the Melbourne suburbs.

The Site-Specific Design Problem Most of the backyard was to be dedicated to the two little girls, meaning a grassed play area, sandpit, shade sail, cubby house, trampoline, and a large hills hoist washing line (for overseas readers, a hills hoist is as Australian as a kangaroo). The Site-Specific Design Solution This was the first time we used what we now call a magical chicken tunnel.

Zoom! And another: Follow This Tip In Your Garden & Get A Ton Of Organic Strawberries! Our vegetable garden project: Vertical vegetable garden ideas. Organic Gardening: Seed-Starting, Composting, Spring Planting. Bottle Drip Irrigation | I prefer to have the bottle standing right-way-up as I think it looks nicer and it keeps debris out of the bottle thus keeping the holes from blocking.

The materials: * 2 litre plastic soft-drink bottle or water bottle * Sharp small screwdriver, pointed hole-maker or drill This can be used in container gardening, raised bed gardens and open vegetable gardens. Using your pocket knife, make 2 small slits in the bottom of your bottle. Dig a hole next to your tomato plant. This will slowly deep-water your tomato plants and most other vegetable plants. You can learn more about this on another website. Only two very small holes are needed at the lowest place on the bottle. I prefer to leave the lids off. Place bamboo stakes next to each bottle. Here I am making another hole slightly higher up the bottle. However, if I remove the lid, water will come out this hole as well as the holes in the base.

You can make larger holes, and partly fill the bottle with coarse-sand or soil to slow the flow. The Australian | Latest Australian National & Business News | TheAustralian. It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest. Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more.

All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest. “This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer. The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild.

Gardening Tips and Advice| Weekend Gardener Web Magazine. Interview with Kultivator, an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice. Images Kultivator from the series Wedding between art and agriculture I discovered KULTIVATOR a couple of years ago at Pixelache in Helsinki. The collective was founded in 2005 by 3 artists and 2 organic farmers in the village Dyestad, on the Swedish island of Öland. This cooperation of farming and visual art practice involves an organic farm with where pigs are raised, cows are milked, potatoes are harvested and linseed oil is pressed.

But KULTIVATOR is also a space for artist residencies, exhibitions, performances, installations and screenings. And in between are activities that draw in both the artist and the farming community. Malin Vrijman, one of the founding members of Kultivator, was kind enough to answer my many questions: Wedding masquerade Dyestad farm pig In an interview for publik.dk, you said that there are many similarities between the way you live and work as artists and how an organic farmer live and work.

But even more interestingly, what did you bring to each other? Farmers Go Wild by Abby Quillen. Going beyond organic, a new generation of farmers is nurturing nature as well as crops. posted Feb 06, 2012 Jack Gray of Winter Green Farm outside of Eugene, Ore., is committed to farming without harming surrounding wildlife and natural ecosystems. “Frogs are an indicator species,” Jack Gray explains, leaning over a small, muddy pond to look for tadpoles. Here on the 170-acre Winter Green Farm, 20 miles west of Eugene, Ore., Gray has raised cattle and grown vegetables and berries for 30 years.

It’s a sunny April day, but water pools in the pastures, evidence of the rains this part of Oregon is known for. Gray is in his mid-50s and agile from decades of working outside. They envision a landscape where farms meld into the environment and mimic the natural processes that surround them. Cows graze in a field behind him; wind whispers through a stand of cattails, and two mallards lift off. Gray, his wife, Mary Jo, and two other families co-own Winter Green Farm. The Mountain Lion and the Lamb. The transformative power of Permablitz. At the Permaculture Design Course we just finished in Sydney, Adam Grubb got everyone truly inspired about the power of Permablitz.

A good permablitz is an valuable opportunity to participate in design, community, digging, growing and learning, all in one day. Following on from Adam’s excellent ‘How to run a Permablitz really well’ talk that he gave during his visit (video of the talk is below), there’s been a few videos come to light that really help understand just why a permablitz is so darn cool. So I thought I’d share them with you… A great timelapse from a November 2011 permablitz in Brunswick, Melbourne: The ‘How to run a Permablitz’ Talk that Adam Grubb gave in Sydney recently: And a great Permablitz at Angel Street Community Garden, Newtown, Sydney, in 2008: A lovely slideshow of a blitz in a small backyard at Reservoir, Melbourne, in 2009 For more info on how and why to run a permablitz, start at.

The Best Way to Ripen Peaches. A Ripe Peach Is Worth the Wait I love peaches too much to eat them as the rock hard flavorless orbs we’ve come to expect from the local grocer. It’s worth every penny to buy from local growers or grow peaches yourself as it seems impossible to ship perfectly ripe peaches. Heck, I can’t take a bag full of my peaches to a neighbor across the street without having jam upon arrival. After years of trying many techniques, I believe I’ve found the best way to ripen a peach if picked too early or trucked in from another local and picked firm.

It’s simple and it works. How to Ripen a Peach to Juicy Perfection Step 1: Selection Please, never squeeze a peach as you basically ruin it. Step 2: Nap Time for Your Peaches Place the peach or nectarine stem side down on a linen napkin, pillowcase, or cotton woven towel, as these fabrics breathe. Step 3: No Direct Sunlight Make sure the fruit doesn’t touch and is kept in a cool place out of the sun.

Step 4. Step 5: Gauging Ripeness. P E R M A V A T I O N S. Lawn Reform Coalition. Raised garden beds: hugelkultur instead of irrigation. Raised garden bed hugelkultur after one month raised garden bed hugelkultur after one year raised garden bed hugelkultur after two years raised garden bed hugelkultur after twenty years It's a german word and some people can say it all german-ish.

I learned this high-falootin word at my permaculture training. Hugelkultur is nothing more than making raised garden beds filled with rotten wood. I do think there are some considerations to keep in mind. Another thing to keep in mind is that wood is high in carbon and will consume nitrogen to do the compost thing. Pine and fir will have some levels of tanins in them, but I'm guessing that most of that will be gone when the wood has been dead for a few years. In the drawings at right, the artist is trying to show that while the wood decomposes and shrinks, the leaves, duff and accumulating organic matter from above will take it's place. Three Little Chickens. Week 18 in the OMG – and Happy New Year to all… | Milkwood Market Garden. Christmas is over and the goose was fat – thank you Lloyd !

Rain fell – heaps (23mm in 20mins the day after Boxing Day) so everything around here is still very green. The OMG is looking very lush but the week was quiet and relaxed as our new WOOFer demonstrates ! Baz resting in the shade....so very helpful he is A few views of growing lushness … Tomato abundance - climber and bush tomatoes San Marzano tomatoes growing - interesting shapes... Capsicums (left) and flourishing spaghetti squash (right) Sweet corn A beautiful wall of peas Scarlet runner beans now at the top of the 2m frame - small beans are already forming on the lowest flowers However all is not quite well – it’s great in the OMG where all growing gorgeousness is protected by a very fine fence – outside in the Bean Border we find we are now feeding the rabbit population who love the borlotti beans. Denuded Borlotti bean stalks - fortunately the rabbits don't eat potato leaves Like this: Like Loading...